The highest cost components of a solar photovoltaic (PV) system are the solar cells that convert sunlight to electricity by the photoelectric effect. To use these cells more effectively, concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) systems focus sunlight from a larger aperture onto a smaller cell area. Although many CPV designs have been developed from the very beginning of the commercial PV industry in the 1960's, not one has achieved significant commercial success as of late 2007. Although CPV designs use less active cell material, they typically require additional structure such as mirrors, lenses and heat sinks, and are fundamentally limited to utilizing less then all of the total available light. These factors increase cost and system complexity and reduce the optical-to-electrical efficiency over non-concentrating PV systems.
Although existing concentrating solar PV systems address some applications, there are continuing efforts to further improve the design and cost effectiveness of concentrating PV system.